Facebook Tones Down Beacon; Gets $60M in Chinese Funding
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | November 30, 2007 | Share This
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Under pressure from users and privacy groups, Facebook’s Beacon ad system, which launched three weeks ago to include off-Facebook purchases in users’ news feeds, just underwent significant changes to make it easier for users to keep their third-party site activities private. The social network was forced this week to save face after MoveOn.org campaigned against Beacon, so they made several rounds of changes until finally settling on an opt-in system instead of an opt-out system, making this statement yesterday (via AllFacebook):
Stories about actions users take on external websites will continue to be presented to users at the top of their News Feed the next time they return to Facebook. These stories will now always be expanded on their home page so they can see and read them clearly.
Users must click on “OK” in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site. We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice.
If a user does nothing with the initial notification on Facebook, it will hide after some duration without a story being published. When a user takes a future action on a Beacon site, it will reappear and display all the potential stories along with the opportunity to click “OK” to publish or click “remove” to not publish.
Users will have clear options in ongoing notifications to either delete or publish. No stories will be published if users navigate away from their home page. If they delay in making this decision, the notification will hide and they can make a decision at a later time.
Clicking the “Help” link next to the story will take users to a full tutorial that explains exactly how Beacon works, with screenshots showing each step in the process.
Instead of launching an opt-out system from the get-go, Facebook should have learned from the uproar caused just over a year ago, when they launched news feeds without any warning and without a way to let users control how their information was being broadcast to their friends. Of course, news feeds are now the cornerstone of Facebook, one being duplicated soon by rival MySpace, but the issue with Beacon was its use of information from third-party sites being used to sell to your friends, and the sheisty set-up that made it hard to avoid sharing stuff. In fact, considering their gaffe, they should have gone a little further with these Beacon changes; Mashable rightly notes that as more outside sites sign on for Beacon, all those notifications are bound to get really annoying. Om Malik also makes a good point about data collection, wondering if anything has really changed except for public perception:
If you decide to opt out completely, you are in the clear, but if you forget to do so, and take no action, then Facebook system will keep collecting data. In other words, Beacon continues to do its job - collect information from partner sites and also fine tune the advertising system. From that perspective, nothing really has changed. Perhaps the public perception that Facebook listens to its community.
Perhaps no coincidence, with the dust of the Beacon storm barely settled, All Things Digital reported late last night that Chinese billionaire Li Ka-shing just invested $60 million in Facebook, with the right to invest $60 million more.
Topics: Advertising: Behavioral, Facebook, Investment, M&A, Social Media |
As long as no one exposes my Facebook Scrabulous addiction, I’m OK…